


and i can go anywhere i want, just not home

by fitzroysquare



Series: in my defense, i have none [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Boeshane Peninsula, Cardiff, Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:08:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28640523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzroysquare/pseuds/fitzroysquare
Summary: Not everybody has a home. Jack knows that better than most.
Series: in my defense, i have none [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2098842
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	and i can go anywhere i want, just not home

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from Taylor Swift's my tears ricochet

When Jack ends up in 6 BCE Greece on a routine Time Agency mission, he doesn’t expect to be enthralled by the story of Odysseus, a king who fights through monsters and mythical trials to return to his home in Ithaca. He hears the adventurous tale of the tragic hero and thinks maybe his journey through life is destined to be just as exhilarating and awe-inspiring.

It’s not until later, when he burns his life down and cobbles it back together with mismatched pieces of memory that Jack realises the fundamental difference between them: Odysseus gets to go home. He never does.

Home, that mystifying concept which seems to be forever eluding, is not just a place but a time, too. And Jack, a man so far removed from both, has no choice but to run through the universe with only his memory to remind him that such a thing exists.

And oh does he run through the universe, afraid to pause and catch his breath just in case he allows the ghosts of his past to catch up with him. Out of everything, it’s the ghosts that he’s afraid of the most, the ghosts that roam the homeland he once, but no longer takes up arms to defend. Before he fled to the beckoning stars, he tried living with them, letting himself rest in their embrace until he himself started to decay with the weight of their sorrow.

Now he reminds himself to bury the dead and leave the remains of their bodies six feet under, in the hopes that the dirt keeping them below ground is enough to keep them from haunting him, too. He flits from planet to planet like they are hotel rooms, trying them on for size before discarding them in disappointment. Jack isn’t sure whether home is something that can be replaced, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to find it in the stars, in the eyes of his many lovers, or even in the bottom of his drink.

Once, on a dark night in Cardiff right before Torchwood sends Tommy Brockless back to his own time, Jack tells Ianto that he left home a long time ago. It’s not the entire truth, of course. 

What Jack leaves unsaid is that no one leaves home unless home becomes quicksand, consuming the bodies whole until there’s not even bones left to bury. No one runs for the stars afraid to look back unless the vacuum of space lets you breathe easier than the air of the open skies. No one reaches for a gun instead of a hand because it is the safer option.

When the sky falls and takes bodies down with it, home doesn’t tell you to run as much it pushes you out and screams at you to do whatever it takes to save your own life. And to do that, Jack had to reach for a gun, not a hand, and watch as the stretch of beach making up the Boeshane Peninsula became nothing more than a small smudge through a spacecraft window.

Jack didn’t leave home, not really, because it left him first.

The crying, yelling, begging that rings across the beach for days, weeks, months after the attack is not home. The empty eyes of his mother and the defeated looks of his neighbours is not home. But after years of distance and his too full brain overflowing with memories, Jack almost starts to forget that home is not those things.

When most of his life has been spent running from home or running to find one, he wonders if there’s a place out in the vast expanse of the universe where just for a moment, he can rest his weary head. Cardiff, Jack supposes, is as good as any.


End file.
